Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West too has known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, yet so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows. Japanese ghosts have traditionally no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are clear as glass. This is true too of our household implements: we prefer colours compounded of darkness, they prefer the colours of sunlight. And of silverware and copperware: we love them for the burnish and patina, which they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a glittering brilliance. They paint their ceilings and walls in pale colours to drive out as many of the shadows as they can. We fill our gardens with dense plantings, they spread out a flat expanse of grass.

- Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933)

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Notes

Thanks to stillstream.com where Sadayatana is heard each Saturday night at 8 pm CST. Check the schedule for other great shows.

And thanks to the artists who release their music under a creative commons license. Without their music this podcast would not be possible.

All Sadayatana Podcasts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

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